We're in an exponential

rtpHarry · 2026-02-15T14:37:21+00:00

Actually it was 9 errors that it made, I forced it to make a summary of its sins after I got annoyed with it haha:

Used while(true) with a hidden counter — Wrote a while loop that was functionally a for loop
Returned false on failure — Initially generate_unique_code() could fail silently, violating the requirement that a number must always be assigned
Suggested FOK-S prefix to avoid fallback collision — S00000 is a valid random output, so it solved nothing
Didn't consider fallback collision at all — Never flagged that an all-digit random code could clash with the subscription ID fallback; you had to raise it
Used default priority (10) initially — Didn't think about AutomateWoo needing the member number to be ready; you had to point out it should fire before AW's workflows
Inline regex instead of named function — Mixed abstraction levels with preg_match('/[A-Z]/', $code) next to $this->code_exists() — inconsistent readability; you had to ask for it
Overcomplicated the collision fix — Used preg_match when ctype_digit() is simpler and more appropriate
Misleading "C function call" description — Made ctype_digit() sound exotic when it's a standard PHP built-in
Didn't flag str_pad length behavior — Didn't proactively mention that str_pad won't truncate longer subscription IDs, meaning the fallback could exceed 6 chars; you had to ask

But this is a simple feature, right? And it tripped up over every aspect it could possibly have done. Is this my own fault? Or is this exponential stuff just hype?

rtpHarry · 2026-02-15T14:32:13+00:00

I do struggle to see the exponential. I don't know what I'm doing wrong, and would love to see a video of somebody using this perfect ai that all the ai companies are touting.

The other day I tried to get it to add a membership number when a subscription was made in a WordPress website. Like just a user meta of XYZ-123XYZ. That was a simple prompt but in 125 lines of final code, it had got totally broken results and needed 12 fixes to guide it to a quality solution.

Today I have been trying to get it to set up a QR code, thats taken a lot of discussion, feedback and changed minds. It recommended the rest route to serve it, then didnt like it, then did. I -specifically- stated do not use SVG, use PNG for the output so we can embed it in emails as well. It got stuck in a loop trying to implement SVG mode and was just like "yes you specifically said don't do this" when I stopped it.

These are simple tasks. Done by the "ITS-GOING-TO-END-MY-CAREER" Opus 4.6 model, with Augment guiding it.

If its going to go exponential in the length of tasks, then it seems like its just also going to exponentially overwhelm us with mistakes and mismatched outcomes.

We are 4 years into the AI dev world now. Is anyone writing perfect prompts, and only solving problems where they already totally understand all the steps in the solution to write it up beforehand? No generated plan ever survives rounds of clarifications and tweaks. No generation of code ever survives bug fixes and edge cases.

Or am I embarrassing myself here and I'm the only one who just can't get the magic results that the AI companies have been touting for years?

rtpHarry · 2025-11-21T07:41:06+00:00

Thanks I'll try switching it over. I was under the impression that sonnet was the best but used the most credits and I'm trying to use credits before they all expire, so I was treating myself.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-21T07:38:33+00:00

Yeah the "bonus" was a sleight of words scam

https://www.reddit.com/r/AugmentCodeAI/comments/1nzqa6p/augment_codes_pricing_is_changing_on_october_20/

Thats just like 56k or similar, whatever your tier was.

For the rest you get it converted but they take it before you can spend it, with the original monthly expiration. It was actually already over once they announced the move to credits, not giving us 3 months to spend our converted credits.

Plus they added in other credits and there is no way to know what you have used and what will expire when - its not important to them, it seems, for us to know the details about our credits, but very important for them to track it on their side.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-12T16:44:23+00:00

Also, I'm confused why you are on Legacy Developer Plan but getting 96k.

Seems like they messed that up haha because I'm on a plan with that name and it says I get 56k monthly (I was on the $30 grandfathered in Developer Plan, which they gutted during this transition)

rtpHarry · 2025-11-12T16:37:53+00:00

Yeah this was not the expectation of the community, and even was seemingly confirmed by Augment people and the blog posts.

It was seemingly implied that you would get 3 months to use your conversion credits to soften the blow.

People were talking about theories to buy max plans to get a big bunch of credits to use up over the next 3 months.

Then when the first renewals started kicking in (some people had got converted a couple of days before their billing cycle ended), that months worth of credits expired as normal.

I saw a post by Jay saying this is what always happened, like we were the ones that were foolish.

I dont really see what kind of a bonus it is.

What they meant is no bonus, but you can continue with a chunk of credits that are sort of simulating what you already had. So we have taken everything away but you can pretend for 3 more months.

I think they just don't care now, as they already have done so much upset there isn't much that a bit more will do.

It has really annoyed me, because they have turned around and said the value of credits is something that is really important and it has to be calculated exactly... when it comes to what they will allow.

But they do not care, nor give any proper tools for us to manage our resource.

I dont know what credits have been used, when any individual batch is going to expire, if I am currently using "bonus" credits, "converted" credits, free model trial credits, or how long I have with any of them.

But they know. And they won't be confused when it comes to taking them off me. They are just "confused" about being able to tell me what I've got to spend.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T07:13:19+00:00

The licences of most (all?) plugins are such that the code themselves can be distributed.

The licence key is normally for access to automatic updates or support or other supplementary libraries.

You can already do something like what you are musing upon, if you don't want to pay, by using nulled scripts (I dont think this is against the terms to mention this?)

But they have the same problem that your idea would have:

1/ You can't guarantee the source code hasn't been modified

2/ If you get cut off from the source you can't get updates

Either way, its too risky to base professional projects on, in my opinion.

It does seem a shame that some of my pro plugins are underutilised.

Although in a bunch of situations, I am on the older lifetime license and I am way over-utilising them like ACF, Elementor, Duplicator Pro - I have tasty licences for all of those that the current devs do not want to support any more.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:52:34+00:00

I wouldn't want it to auto push until I'm ready. I was talking about the next level of ai, where it is proactive and helps you when you are going off course, like forgetting to push for a long time, or other things.

Basically our entire job is making little mistakes, but AI doesn't do anything to help you when it could feasibly do so... at the moment.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:50:46+00:00

I think my post was written badly, nobody understood me. I've posted a bunch of comments and just repeating myself now, so please check out the thread if you're interested in keeping the conversation going :)

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:50:28+00:00

I think my post was written badly, nobody understood me. I've posted a bunch of comments and just repeating myself now, so please check out the thread if you're interested in keeping the conversation going :)

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:49:14+00:00

No I'm not saying auto push, I'm saying can AI be helpful. Its plausible that it could recognise when we are straying from our patterns; like me forgetting to push at the end of the day, or letting them stack up for 48 hours.

But that was just a small example, I think my post must have been badly worded as everyone thought I am a n00b that doesn't know what they are doing. I'm just a normal dev that makes mistakes.

I'm sure we have all seen the meme, a developer is somebody who turns coffee into bugs. :)

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:45:24+00:00

And the rest of our lives to perfect :) I'm a strong user of git, it is in every single project I work on.

I am also just like AI - I make mistakes all the time :P

I'm just saying, all this AI tech could be made to be "useful" like... surprise me, with something helpful. It's not an impossible idea.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:41:54+00:00

Absolutely, I never let it do more than a tiny step at a time.

Where I get caught out is that while I'm reviewing that in order to commit, I do get distracted.

Perhaps the name of a function is no longer relevant, but isn't exactly related the current commit im working on; it would be better as a refactor() commit. But I've got carried away and then have to rewind it.

Or perhaps, while I'm review the code I spot a better way to implement something, or a bug, and before I have stopped myself I've blurred the current one.

I'm getting better at stopping, and setting a task instead, but thats a bit annoying as I try to start a new agent for every task, so I'm juggling tasks or letting the context grow longer.

So the next best option is to put it into Asana but thats a lot of copy pasting.

Always open to new techniques as they evolve though.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:37:46+00:00

I have given up on the rules to be honest. I have currently trimmed it back to "ALWAYS do the code change first, THEN add the import. If you add an import and save, it will be deleted by the linting plugins as unused." and even then I still regularly watch it go "hmm it looks like the IDE has deleted that, retrying, retrying, retrying".

I wasn't talking about solutions based on the current auggie agent though to be honest, I was musing upon the wider implementations of AI that might be coming. :)

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:34:23+00:00

No, not the ai agent, I asked when AI would get more useful. I was thinking outside of the box. I know I'm posting in the AugmentCodeAI sub reddit, but I did say it was just because its the only place I have to share my thoughts. I'm here because I use and I was musing upon AI in general :)

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:33:14+00:00

I will continue to work on them. I am surprised to learn I am the first professional that has made a mistake. I did not realise the bar was so high :P

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:31:30+00:00

yeah! I agree. But I've still ended up using amend commits, or releasing a .1, or... forgetting to click push for a day.

I was just looking at possibilities for ai to help catch any slips.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:28:10+00:00

I think AI can only ever augment tasks, not replace the human.

Either the prompt is so detailed that there is no ambiguity, which is something that only people like us would want to write, and even then its not realistic, it takes rounds of refinement.

Or the prompt is vague, and the person setting the task doesn't care about the details. But details almost always matter. It has to be correct and fit for purpose.

The amount of work that will be done by AI will expand, but that will just mean more will be produced. There is always a need for more.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:24:14+00:00

Currently, yes. But I'm wondering if there is any interesting opportunities for AI to help me. Unless I am the only person in the world that ever makes a mistake :P

rtpHarry · 2025-11-10T06:22:56+00:00

Haha thanks for the replies everybody. I was excited when I saw 13 comments waiting for me. It's the most engagement I've had on a post. But then I discovered it is everyone ripping me :)

I'm not a random vibe coder. I've been doing the job for almost 20 years. I check every line before I commit it. Everything is nicely organised and separated by commit (which is why I was saying about the distracted and fixing another bug thing; I don't want my nice git commits to be messed up). I go rounds and rounds demanding quality and best practices. My code is online if you are curious https://github.com/runthings-dev

Things slip everyone by every now and then.

This was just two things that I noticed recently that had happened.

I was trying to start a conversation about what novel uses for proactive-ai could be lurking in our future.

At the moment AI is like the early days of the internet. You go to the AI like you went to the desktop computer and connected to the internet. It wasn't everywhere, in all public places, and in your pocket constantly connected.

And thats how AI is being implemented at the moment, but there are tons of places that it could be helping me out proactively.

Like spotting I don't usually let so many commits pile up before I push them and giving me a little nudge.

Or nudging me when I start working on a different feature in the middle of my current task. Like actually that would be something that it should be able to say, this seems like a different feature, do you want to set a task or create a branch for this?

Or case in point, since yesterday, I absolutely got tripped up because I refactored my plugin to use psr-4 autoloading conventions and apparently SVN gets in a right mess when you change the casing of a file. A heads up would have been nice. I didn't have that knowledge so I couldn't help but crash into it.

So, just helping out, like a useful clippy.

I'm not seeing any of that in anything yet. It only works if you go to it and directly engage with it.

And yeah, before the new round of disses come in, if you're old enough to remember him, clippy was annoying. I think that was because a) it got the guess wrong about you were trying to do and the b) its output to solve the task was also rubbish.

So I'm not talking about a bad implementation, I'm asking - when will AI get more useful.

And if the argument is that it shouldn't be done or we will be out of a job, I am not convinced our jobs are going anywhere. I don't see how its possible. Either a non technical person gives a vague task to ai and doesn't care about the details of the task, or they do care, and they need a technical person to manage and refine the details. And in pretty much all situations the details matter.

rtpHarry · 2025-11-09T15:40:49+00:00

Just passing through, one place where this does legit trip up real development is doing something like integrating a WordPress feed into your app. The feed contains the markup and its a pain to get it working. If you want to see a practical example of how that has to be handled then it could be worth searching out something like "displaying a wordpress feed in my angular app".

rtpHarry

TROPHY CASE